All the terraforming options are rather intimidating, however; I like to imagine a sci-fi future with terraformed planets (since it gives me places to go without that messy business of breaking the speed of light, or having travel from World A to World B take ridiculous amounts of time), but the mechanisms involved for it being "realistic" seem to imply that technology would need to rise to such extremes that we could hardly relate to the setting anymore.

(Too much high-tech + players = the GM being overwhelmed when the PCs punch holes in plots by figuring out implications that he hadn't thought of beforehand. Well, anyway, that's what seems to happen in MY sci-fi games....)_________________

(Too much high-tech + players = the GM being overwhelmed when the PCs punch holes in plots by figuring out implications that he hadn't thought of beforehand. Well, anyway, that's what seems to happen in MY sci-fi games....)

You could always set the game after the Very High Tech civilization *falls.*

In the real world, we can't repair certain old strategic nuclear weapons because everybody who knew how to do it is dead and none of them wrote down the procedures (because these were too classified). Given how a lot of knowledge is held virtually in the internet cloud even today, it's not that hard to imagine a far future where Something Bad Happened Way Back When To The Think Machines. The player characters simply have no basis for understanding *how* the Ultra Powerful Black Box Thingees work. In Savage World terms, it's essentially Magic with the Trapping "Incomprehensibly Advanced Tech."

You could always set the game after the Very High Tech civilization *falls.*

Very good point. I feel ridiculous for not thinking of that right away. That's actually how they portrayed it in the Mutant Chronicles universe (and among my various options would be to simply run a Savage Mutant Chronicles campaign, or some variant thereof). So much of the solar system has been terraformed in ages past in logic-defying ways, hand-waved as "old technology." Civilization nearly collapsed, old tech was lost (and there are in-universe reasons why a lot of it simply CANNOT work anymore), etc.

I guess my aesthetic reluctance to go that far is that there's a certain appeal to having things in the "near-future" or "almost-near-future," in that the players can feel a little more comfortable about the setting and what sorts of things might exist "back home." But then, if I think about it, any technological advances required to put us in a world where cybernetics are widespread, space travel is commercial and fairly common, and there might even be other forms of sapient life (that we've engineered), are pretty much going to alter the landscape so much that such "familiarity" is unrealistic -- and I might as well just push it forward into a new and unfamiliar environment (much like what I do when I run a "generic fantasy" game).

If a player makes up a few megacorporations or space colonies as placeholder names in his back-story or casual conversation, so be it; we can fill in the gaps in this setting as we go._________________

But then, if I think about it, any technological advances required to put us in a world where cybernetics are widespread, space travel is commercial and fairly common, and there might even be other forms of sapient life (that we've engineered), are pretty much going to alter the landscape so much that such "familiarity" is unrealistic . .

You might want to look at GURPS Transhuman Space. It's a near-future setting in the midst of dealing with multiple, overlapping waves of culture shock from the consequences of such tech advances. The coolest thing about the setting (at least for me) is that there is no such a thing as a "robot" per se. Instead, there are "digital intelligences" which may or may not inhabit discrete automata at any given time. These might be teleoperated machines, independent AIs (of varying capacity), programmed emulations of specific people ("I'm running Britney 3.0 on that one.") or even the digitized brain of a dead person.

(It might sound like I'm pushing GURPS, but it just happens that I bought most of their older stuff back when I had disposable income . . . and they *are* really good at settings.)